Welcome to our 2024 Catalog!
We are excited to greet everyone once again with open doors and hearts flung wide to the joy and grief and wildness of our gardens and farms. The mighty web that connects Fedco workers and customers alike is the Earth, where we plant and tend our seeds, and which tends and feeds us in return. Despite, by all appearances, a growing chasm of polarity within the democratic experiment, we find our shared values year after year when we dig into the fertile soil that sustains us all.
Even in the sanctuaries of our gardens, we can’t escape the heartache and challenges facing our communities. It was a rough spring for us in central Maine; longer, wetter and colder than it’s been in more than a decade, followed by an unreasonably hot summer. As we entered autumn, we found ourselves cleaning up after a rare hurricane made landfall. Yet we’ve been more fortunate than many. Drought and fires have ravaged the boreal forests to our north and west, clouding the sun with smoke for days at a time. A horrific and prolonged deadly heat blanketed the Southwest. Our neighbors in Vermont are still rebuilding after a devastating hundred-year flood. How many gardens, both tended and wild, were burned, drowned or scorched this year? We all share this grief.
Yet gardeners are resourceful. We will save what seeds we can and replant next season. The garden grounds us, replenishes us, and quite literally feeds us. At Organic Growers Supply, we strive to offer sensible affordable supplies and tools that will help growers at all scales to nurture the plants that sustain our families and wider communities.
A few highlights in this year’s listing:
- We are thrilled to reintroduce the beloved Green Mountain potato, tenderly pulled back from the brink of extinction.
- For folks with smaller plots, we’ve introduced half-pound package sizes of onion and shallot sets.
- Our new Turbo Seed Starter is a more sustainable potting mix that’s made without peat, thus protecting fragile ecosystems.
- For a bit of fun, we’ve added a new Fedco trucker cap, featuring artwork by our longtime co-worker Sarah Oliver.
- More and more growers are excluding pests with durable ProtekNet insect netting, and we’ve added an even heavier-duty option that boasts a 4–5 year lifespan.
- We’ve expanded our pole pruner line. Keep those fruit trees healthy and in shipshape!
We are also especially glad to welcome new leadership to our operation. On behalf of the OGS team and our entire work collective, we welcome aboard Jen Goff, who is already moving us forward as we navigate increasing climatic and economic turbulence. Jen brings years of agricultural product-development experience and business savvy, with just as much garden soil under her fingernails as the rest of us.
Happy planting,
– Noah Dillard, on behalf of OGS
Changes to OGS and POE shipping
No matter how much Fedco has evolved over the years, we remain primarily a mail-order business. This puts us at the mercy of the shipping industry, as costs climb ever-upward. We are continually striving for the right mix of shipping strategies that serve our customers well, while not putting us in the hole. OGS and Potatoes have made a few changes this year that bear explanation:
45 lb bags/boxes instead of 50 lb: Last year we noticed FedEx was charging us thousands of dollars in handling fees for all of our packages 50 lb or more. So even though 50 lb, for many products, is a standard unit of measurement, we’ve shrunk our largest bag size for OGS to 45 lb in order to avoid these fees and keep our price to you as low as possible. Similarly at Potatoes, we’ve moved our largest unit into a 45 lb box.
A higher weight threshold for freight orders: In previous years, we’ve recommended any order over 200 lb ship via freight if possible, in order to receive the best price on shipping. However, for orders up to 300 lb, FedEx is often the better deal.
Increased pallet rates for freight orders: Moving things around the country at 6 mpg costs a lot of money. Even more money than it did last year and the year before. So we’ve had to raise our pallet rates for the Northeast to help keep up. That said, it remains a flat rate, up to 2,200 lb/pallet, so the more you pack onto one pallet, the better the per-pound price will be.
Pre-paid accessory fees at checkout: Freight companies are pros at tacking on additional fees for various aspects of their services. Often we don’t find out about them until after a delivery is made. Then we have to come back to you and ask for more money, which isn’t fun for anyone. So we’ve added a few buttons to our online freight checkout screen where you can note your need for a liftgate, residential delivery, and for Potato orders, freeze protection. There is no markup on any of these fees —we’re simply passing on the charges we receive from our freight carriers for those specific services. The upside is that we’ll need fewer e-mail exchanges to fill your order and, for customers in the Northeast, you’ll be able to pay for your entire order at one time, at checkout, meaning we can get your order shipped even faster.
We’re hoping our attempts to keep up with the times will result in a more sustainable shipping business for Fedco and a smoother experience for you. For any questions, e-mail logistics@fedcoseeds.com.